Anonymous Attacks MIT, Justice Department After Programmer's Suicide

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Anonymous hacktivists angry over the prosecution and suicide of a
prominent computer programmer and free-speech activist attacked
the websites of the Department of Justice and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology yesterday (Jan. 13).

Aaron Swartz, 26, hanged himself Friday (Jan. 11) in his Brooklyn
apartment. In April, Swartz would have begun trial in Boston over
allegations that he had broken into MIT's network to download
more than 4 million articles from JSTOR, an online repository of
archived scientific and academic journals. Prosecutors dropped
the charges today (Jan. 14).

"Whether or not the government contributed to his suicide, the
government's prosecution of Swartz was a grotesque miscarriage of
justice, a distorted and perverse shadow of the justice that
Aaron died fighting for," said an Anonymous statement posted on
the MIT website yesterday and reproduced elsewhere.

JSTOR subscriptions can cost academic institutions tens of
thousands of dollars per year. Swartz, who was 14 when he helped
to develop the protocols for RSS readers, and later helped
develop Reddit, had long argued that information in the public
domain ought to be freely available.

JSTOR declined to press charges against Swartz, but the U.S.
Department of Justice, with MIT's partial cooperation, indicted
Swartz in July 2011 on four counts of wire fraud and computer
hacking.

According to the New York Times' estimate, Swartz faced up to 35
years in prison and up to $1 million in fines.

"Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy," a statement by Swartz's family said Saturday
(Jan. 12). "It is the product of a criminal justice system
rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions
made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney's office
and at MIT contributed to his death."

As of 9:30 a.m. EST today, the MIT website was back up, as was
the main Department of Justice website at www.justice.gov. An
alternate Department of Justice site, www.doj.gov, was
unreachable.